Walking home from a groceries excursion, the ravine stink was sharp and constant until I made my way to the other side of the highway and on through a better stretch of road and trail, then sidestreet. But before leaving the highway, the familiar sight of brave blue, yellow, and red rectangular boards had popped up like mutant daffodils or flags at low mast. Elect or re-elect, then genuflect. Kindly be influenced by this reminder, peon, and march to the ballot box. The nose-holding went on, unabated.
The other night I watched part one of the American Civil War re-run on PBS. A Lincoln quote -- "I would rather be assassinated than see a single star removed from the American flag" -- reminded me, by somber contrast, of our current lie-with-a-smile season, and to that shameful episode not long ago when post-election Stephane Dion and Jack Layton formed a coalition with Duceppe.
Revisiting the ravine or trundling off to the poll booth. What to do, what to do ....
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Gary Geddes' Swimming Ginger
If I could have any one poetry blog-review of mine redone *, it would be last July's assessment of Gary Geddes' Falsework. Though I haven't changed my mind about it's uneven construction, I vastly underestimated its powerfully etched character studies and psychological perspicacity.
These are the dangers of reviewing a book fairly soon, even after several readings. Good books tend to grow on one, while the bad books become even more irksome if they're engaged with again.
Geddes' 2010 poetry collection Swimming Ginger, also a re-enactment of historical record in multiple voices and perspectives, consolidates the strengths of his previous Second Narrows Bridge narrative while avoiding the more egregious stumbles of cadence and syntax in that book. That said, the creative energies transferred to these imaginative Chinese characters still have the look and process of mere reportage, at times -- ("In pre-dawn hours a traveller was stabbed/near West Gate, a dispute over money/or a woman" from "Silk River") -- but the fullness and motivation of the monologues win out.
Part of the problem with detailed narratives in poetry is that an author usually tries to shoehorn fascinating tidbits of information into a vessel not always amenable to the operation. Geddes, though, much more so here than in Falsework, has allowed himself to create enjoyably disparate stories out of the speculation on those shadowy figures in the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll from the (assumed to be) 12th century. Though knowledge of the inner lives of these people is obviously more of a challenge -- linguistically, culturally, temporally -- Geddes has the benefit of speaking for a wide cross-section of the roiling masses as depicted in the scroll. And it's here that a cohering thematic is most fascinating, stitching these differences under an umbrella of quietly subversive class warfare, Geddes typically giving voice to those otherwise unheard, and hence, unknown. The book is saturated with people struggling to make a few (what today would be called) yuan, while simultaneously attempting to keep their sanity. Sometimes it's to comic effect ("his wineglass extended. Drink up, I say,//pouring the liquid on his head, I take pleasure/where I find it, too." from "Magpiety") ; sometimes it's for unassuming pathos ("chock-a-block/with bric-a-brac, I'm at a loss for words." (from "Knackered").
When many reviewers talk about a return to narrative in contemporary poetry, they often just mean a turn towards more elaborate or transparent anecdote. But Geddes isn't afraid of telling a story, complete with (shock!) political and historical context, and doing so without simply using it as a background excuse for ideologies of any and all corner(s). Others draw from that well, too -- Asa Boxer comes to mind -- but where suggestion is concerned, it's delightful to have it linked to a breathing representative of this amazing globe, even if the emotions imparted to him or her are conjured and assumed.
* I find it despicable and cowardly that some bloggers find it no great shakes to alter or even delete entire posts for various reasons -- image; cultural correctness; political positioning; correction for abuse of facts -- when doing so invalidates anything they may say in the future (will this post be "edited" when propitious for the author?, the reader rightly wonders). Some may counter that poets themselves do this when they revise and publish alternate versions of some poems or even entire books. There's a huge difference: the original efforts by a Robert Lowell or Marianne Moore are forever on display, and the revisions, sometimes decades after the fact, as often as not serve to highlight the inferior work (not transcend or obliterate it) just as much as causing us to forget about it altogether.
These are the dangers of reviewing a book fairly soon, even after several readings. Good books tend to grow on one, while the bad books become even more irksome if they're engaged with again.
Geddes' 2010 poetry collection Swimming Ginger, also a re-enactment of historical record in multiple voices and perspectives, consolidates the strengths of his previous Second Narrows Bridge narrative while avoiding the more egregious stumbles of cadence and syntax in that book. That said, the creative energies transferred to these imaginative Chinese characters still have the look and process of mere reportage, at times -- ("In pre-dawn hours a traveller was stabbed/near West Gate, a dispute over money/or a woman" from "Silk River") -- but the fullness and motivation of the monologues win out.
Part of the problem with detailed narratives in poetry is that an author usually tries to shoehorn fascinating tidbits of information into a vessel not always amenable to the operation. Geddes, though, much more so here than in Falsework, has allowed himself to create enjoyably disparate stories out of the speculation on those shadowy figures in the Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll from the (assumed to be) 12th century. Though knowledge of the inner lives of these people is obviously more of a challenge -- linguistically, culturally, temporally -- Geddes has the benefit of speaking for a wide cross-section of the roiling masses as depicted in the scroll. And it's here that a cohering thematic is most fascinating, stitching these differences under an umbrella of quietly subversive class warfare, Geddes typically giving voice to those otherwise unheard, and hence, unknown. The book is saturated with people struggling to make a few (what today would be called) yuan, while simultaneously attempting to keep their sanity. Sometimes it's to comic effect ("his wineglass extended. Drink up, I say,//pouring the liquid on his head, I take pleasure/where I find it, too." from "Magpiety") ; sometimes it's for unassuming pathos ("chock-a-block/with bric-a-brac, I'm at a loss for words." (from "Knackered").
When many reviewers talk about a return to narrative in contemporary poetry, they often just mean a turn towards more elaborate or transparent anecdote. But Geddes isn't afraid of telling a story, complete with (shock!) political and historical context, and doing so without simply using it as a background excuse for ideologies of any and all corner(s). Others draw from that well, too -- Asa Boxer comes to mind -- but where suggestion is concerned, it's delightful to have it linked to a breathing representative of this amazing globe, even if the emotions imparted to him or her are conjured and assumed.
* I find it despicable and cowardly that some bloggers find it no great shakes to alter or even delete entire posts for various reasons -- image; cultural correctness; political positioning; correction for abuse of facts -- when doing so invalidates anything they may say in the future (will this post be "edited" when propitious for the author?, the reader rightly wonders). Some may counter that poets themselves do this when they revise and publish alternate versions of some poems or even entire books. There's a huge difference: the original efforts by a Robert Lowell or Marianne Moore are forever on display, and the revisions, sometimes decades after the fact, as often as not serve to highlight the inferior work (not transcend or obliterate it) just as much as causing us to forget about it altogether.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Geoffrey Hill
After reading Geoffrey Hill's quartet of books -- Canaan (1996); The Triumph of Love (1998); Speech! Speech! (2000); The Orchards of Syon (2002) -- my head ached, expanded, and juddered like Pavarotti's prostate after a high colonic performed by a sadistic fireman with a supertower pressure-hose. If that's slightly hyperbolic, remember that Pavarotti played a sublime tune through his higher cylinder (pre-three Amigos) even under physical stress.
It's become a long-running gripe that the high-modern tag team of Pound and Eliot not only brought back difficulty into their poetry practise and prescription, but introduced skull-busting incomprehensibility. And Hill, like those two and others they influenced, won't amplify a point with, say, a symbol from nature when an arcane suggestion about a little-known fourteenth century mystic can replace it. But Hill isn't a sadist, despite the "you figure it out, riff raff!" glower from the back page photo, at least not in his fundamental intentions, if I may be so bold as to imagine chasing the secretive overactive neurons in his noggin. He knows a lot of stuff 'n' things -- eh? -- and why shouldn't he use the full range of his referential arsenal? Oh I know, to "better communicate". But in this case, when the sonic architecture is so rich, sense really is an added bonus, a surfeit already beyond the bounty of the rhythms and syntactical collisions issueing from "the fieldstone, intricately veined and seamed;/moss, lichen, dobbed with white crut of birds" (from 48. in Speech! Speech!) and "Pigeon-mobbed, on the play-patch, my own/public madman hurls at the laden air/his archive of bagged injustice." (from 69. in The Orchards of Syon).
And in order to deal with the 'high path with no rail' meditation on human nature, including responsibility and guilt and complicity for the horrors of the twentieth century, and for the possibilities and limitations for what lay before us, the author must have an enormous back range of incriminating evidence to deliver the convincing though queasy judgements he proffers for historical figures, contemporary wanderers, readers, and himself: "Suppose I cannot/unearth what it was they buried: research/is not anamnesis" (from 67. in The Triumph of Love). The path is extremely difficult, but there is a finish line, or at least a provisional brightly-coloured rest stop ..... somewhere.
Some critics have -- at times -- seen a cautious or muted hope in these poems, one reviewer going so far as to call the last book in this series, The Orchards of Syon, Hill's "Paradiso". Now that's just wishful-thinking, understandable as an apposite feint after the anguish and severe vision of what's been imaginatively enacted. But hope is not a word to be associated with Hill, and I, for one, am relieved, after reading poem upon poem of soul-scouring honesty, that that's the cause-effect recording. When the subjects are historical human proclivity, and present and future psychological unfolding, hope is a disease, a pernicious and agreeable defense against the mirror and the mind.
It's become a long-running gripe that the high-modern tag team of Pound and Eliot not only brought back difficulty into their poetry practise and prescription, but introduced skull-busting incomprehensibility. And Hill, like those two and others they influenced, won't amplify a point with, say, a symbol from nature when an arcane suggestion about a little-known fourteenth century mystic can replace it. But Hill isn't a sadist, despite the "you figure it out, riff raff!" glower from the back page photo, at least not in his fundamental intentions, if I may be so bold as to imagine chasing the secretive overactive neurons in his noggin. He knows a lot of stuff 'n' things -- eh? -- and why shouldn't he use the full range of his referential arsenal? Oh I know, to "better communicate". But in this case, when the sonic architecture is so rich, sense really is an added bonus, a surfeit already beyond the bounty of the rhythms and syntactical collisions issueing from "the fieldstone, intricately veined and seamed;/moss, lichen, dobbed with white crut of birds" (from 48. in Speech! Speech!) and "Pigeon-mobbed, on the play-patch, my own/public madman hurls at the laden air/his archive of bagged injustice." (from 69. in The Orchards of Syon).
And in order to deal with the 'high path with no rail' meditation on human nature, including responsibility and guilt and complicity for the horrors of the twentieth century, and for the possibilities and limitations for what lay before us, the author must have an enormous back range of incriminating evidence to deliver the convincing though queasy judgements he proffers for historical figures, contemporary wanderers, readers, and himself: "Suppose I cannot/unearth what it was they buried: research/is not anamnesis" (from 67. in The Triumph of Love). The path is extremely difficult, but there is a finish line, or at least a provisional brightly-coloured rest stop ..... somewhere.
Some critics have -- at times -- seen a cautious or muted hope in these poems, one reviewer going so far as to call the last book in this series, The Orchards of Syon, Hill's "Paradiso". Now that's just wishful-thinking, understandable as an apposite feint after the anguish and severe vision of what's been imaginatively enacted. But hope is not a word to be associated with Hill, and I, for one, am relieved, after reading poem upon poem of soul-scouring honesty, that that's the cause-effect recording. When the subjects are historical human proclivity, and present and future psychological unfolding, hope is a disease, a pernicious and agreeable defense against the mirror and the mind.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini
Hey, opera buffs!
I had the good luck to hunt down a DVD copy of the Salzburg Festival production of Hector Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini a week ago. Delighted by the staging and direction of Philipp Stolzl, the musical stewardship of the passionate Valery Gergiev, and (not least) the singing, the 1838 two-act opera was a three-sense treat.
Berlioz, as was typical throughout his career, was misunderstood (O! overused word of too many fragile artists) , ignored, and savaged by his complacent countrypersonhoods, though to focus the surveying laser, the obtuse judgements were the eventual shame of musical directors, musicologists, reviewers, and musicians at least as much as they were of music attendees.
David Solway had great fun with the Andreas Karavis creation, and Doris Lessing humiliated the English gatekeeping publishing set with her repeated "failure" in the "first submission" pseudonym for The Diaries Of Jane Somers, but my favourite artistic jest was orchestrated by Berlioz when he wrote the sublime ninth movement to L'enfance Du Christ, and then claimed he "borrowed" it from a fictive 17th century composer. (Of course, if that project were in play today, Kenneth Goldsmith would be envious in a straight-ahead second-to-the-plate plan.) The reviewers and music-going audience fell over themselves in declaring "it's obvious he couldn't come up with this tenderness!", though it's curious the equally sublime prior movement (#8) was omitted in the comparative hubbub (for obvious strategies). It seems to be a universal failing of our insane, guilt-ridden, and stubborn race that once a reputation is established, for ill or good, it takes the time and effort of a 9,000 tonne ferry to turn around.
All this by way of mentioning that -- 130 to 170 years later -- the opera is finally gaining traction. The initial killjoys? The first musical director hated it, as did the singers and most of the instrumentalists. It was "too hard". And they were right, obviously. But when something's this musically and dramatically excellent, it's a challenge the players should relish.
To bring things up to date, it was with fascinated humour I read (after hearing/viewing the DVD) the comments about the opera on amazon and other outlets regarding the "outlandish" staging, the psychological redrafting (of the Pope and of Cellini, in particular), and the quality of the singing. First off, Berlioz, unlike most other opera composers, favoured and featured the orchestra, though in this, his first opera, he allowed for live interpretation, and he even refashioned and edited the original score several times to please all manner of requests and demands, so that a true libretto for the work is now problematic. Which one? The larger point is that Berlioz -- and here I know I'm assuming a great deal -- would have been far more lenient in the helicopter/robot/lightning/rooftop/popemobile nods to entertaining the $700 a seat shock-chasers if it meant having the bloody thing produced at all! I actually found many of the sets, and the "spontaneous" shenanigans of the chorus (and lead singers) charming, and more to the point, faithful to the spirit of the original score and story. (Of course, as for the "original" story, well, that's another remove altogether, and it's the hilarious wink of opera. If people want to nitpick about narrative discrepancy, they'd find a better target in the play which gave Berlioz his initial plan. The real Benvenuto Cellini, though a multi-talented and highly accomplished Florentine, was also a serial adulterer, multiple-murderer and sodomizing rapist of boys.)
Again, as against some of the joyless twaddle, the singing (and acting), though not powerful, was appropriate to the comic tone and intent, both light and charming, and occasionally poignant. Burkhard Fritz as the eponymous hero was a convincing "bad boy", and the chemistry between him and Teresa, played by the lovely and sweetly anguished Maija Kovalevska, was palpable.
Gergiev was typically brilliant (an underappreciated Shostakovich interpreter -- if you're into S, check out a fabulous rendition of Shostakovich's Symphony #4, in many 10 minute segments, conducted by Gergiev, on you tube, in spite of the compromised production transmission. If the hour is too much, click towards the last, the 3rd, movement -- about 27 minutes -- for the greatest symphonic movement, IMO of course, in the repertoire). Another commenter referred to Gergiev's Benvenuto direction as lacking lightness, when necessary. All I can say is to listen to the tender and incredible Regardons bien maitre Arlequin scene twelve, Act I, and then shrug off those ridiculous, entrenched positions.
Even on CD, only a few versions of Benvenuto Cellini exist. I recommend the Virgin Classics 2004 effort under the needfully detailed direction of John Nelson.
I sometimes hesitate to share thoughts about anything non-verse related here since most come to the blog from that "special interest" (and special interest), but I thought there were more than a few ties to matters poetic, at least in the political sense, and what the hey! I don't feel like opening up different blogs for different subjects and interests.
I had the good luck to hunt down a DVD copy of the Salzburg Festival production of Hector Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini a week ago. Delighted by the staging and direction of Philipp Stolzl, the musical stewardship of the passionate Valery Gergiev, and (not least) the singing, the 1838 two-act opera was a three-sense treat.
Berlioz, as was typical throughout his career, was misunderstood (O! overused word of too many fragile artists) , ignored, and savaged by his complacent countrypersonhoods, though to focus the surveying laser, the obtuse judgements were the eventual shame of musical directors, musicologists, reviewers, and musicians at least as much as they were of music attendees.
David Solway had great fun with the Andreas Karavis creation, and Doris Lessing humiliated the English gatekeeping publishing set with her repeated "failure" in the "first submission" pseudonym for The Diaries Of Jane Somers, but my favourite artistic jest was orchestrated by Berlioz when he wrote the sublime ninth movement to L'enfance Du Christ, and then claimed he "borrowed" it from a fictive 17th century composer. (Of course, if that project were in play today, Kenneth Goldsmith would be envious in a straight-ahead second-to-the-plate plan.) The reviewers and music-going audience fell over themselves in declaring "it's obvious he couldn't come up with this tenderness!", though it's curious the equally sublime prior movement (#8) was omitted in the comparative hubbub (for obvious strategies). It seems to be a universal failing of our insane, guilt-ridden, and stubborn race that once a reputation is established, for ill or good, it takes the time and effort of a 9,000 tonne ferry to turn around.
All this by way of mentioning that -- 130 to 170 years later -- the opera is finally gaining traction. The initial killjoys? The first musical director hated it, as did the singers and most of the instrumentalists. It was "too hard". And they were right, obviously. But when something's this musically and dramatically excellent, it's a challenge the players should relish.
To bring things up to date, it was with fascinated humour I read (after hearing/viewing the DVD) the comments about the opera on amazon and other outlets regarding the "outlandish" staging, the psychological redrafting (of the Pope and of Cellini, in particular), and the quality of the singing. First off, Berlioz, unlike most other opera composers, favoured and featured the orchestra, though in this, his first opera, he allowed for live interpretation, and he even refashioned and edited the original score several times to please all manner of requests and demands, so that a true libretto for the work is now problematic. Which one? The larger point is that Berlioz -- and here I know I'm assuming a great deal -- would have been far more lenient in the helicopter/robot/lightning/rooftop/popemobile nods to entertaining the $700 a seat shock-chasers if it meant having the bloody thing produced at all! I actually found many of the sets, and the "spontaneous" shenanigans of the chorus (and lead singers) charming, and more to the point, faithful to the spirit of the original score and story. (Of course, as for the "original" story, well, that's another remove altogether, and it's the hilarious wink of opera. If people want to nitpick about narrative discrepancy, they'd find a better target in the play which gave Berlioz his initial plan. The real Benvenuto Cellini, though a multi-talented and highly accomplished Florentine, was also a serial adulterer, multiple-murderer and sodomizing rapist of boys.)
Again, as against some of the joyless twaddle, the singing (and acting), though not powerful, was appropriate to the comic tone and intent, both light and charming, and occasionally poignant. Burkhard Fritz as the eponymous hero was a convincing "bad boy", and the chemistry between him and Teresa, played by the lovely and sweetly anguished Maija Kovalevska, was palpable.
Gergiev was typically brilliant (an underappreciated Shostakovich interpreter -- if you're into S, check out a fabulous rendition of Shostakovich's Symphony #4, in many 10 minute segments, conducted by Gergiev, on you tube, in spite of the compromised production transmission. If the hour is too much, click towards the last, the 3rd, movement -- about 27 minutes -- for the greatest symphonic movement, IMO of course, in the repertoire). Another commenter referred to Gergiev's Benvenuto direction as lacking lightness, when necessary. All I can say is to listen to the tender and incredible Regardons bien maitre Arlequin scene twelve, Act I, and then shrug off those ridiculous, entrenched positions.
Even on CD, only a few versions of Benvenuto Cellini exist. I recommend the Virgin Classics 2004 effort under the needfully detailed direction of John Nelson.
I sometimes hesitate to share thoughts about anything non-verse related here since most come to the blog from that "special interest" (and special interest), but I thought there were more than a few ties to matters poetic, at least in the political sense, and what the hey! I don't feel like opening up different blogs for different subjects and interests.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Not All Curmudgeons Are As Superficial As Andy Rooney
"My years on the west coast taught me one thing, if nothing else: a coterie of poets fairly well-appointed in academe and in trendy bars that characterizes itself as marginalized, as a bevy of outsiders, as lacking clout the so-called mainstream enjoys - mainstream? - what mainstream? - is perhaps not to be trusted."
-- Norm Sibum (from the March 26 entry)
http://normsibum.com/ephemeris.html .
I said the same thing in my post some time ago regarding Warren Tallman in rapturous run-on, the vatic mediator trying to snag and petrify the impressionable like beheaded matchsticks in aspic.
-- Norm Sibum (from the March 26 entry)
http://normsibum.com/ephemeris.html .
I said the same thing in my post some time ago regarding Warren Tallman in rapturous run-on, the vatic mediator trying to snag and petrify the impressionable like beheaded matchsticks in aspic.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been
Ralph Gustafson, in the Foreword to his poetry memoir Configurations at Midnight, asserts “I had no wish to proceed by unrolling the epiphanies of a soul from prelude to revelation”. Bravo. One would hope that the only epiphanies which matter in a poem are ultimately those the reader discovers. In the twilight (hopefully not midnight) of his career, Don Coles uses a similar approach in his poetry memoir. By retracing the treacherous and fascinating routes of event and memory, biographical and autobiographical image and error, Coles’ stance is less certain than Gustafson’s, but similarly wise and forceful in its concern with building bridges from experience to thought to transmission. Coles’ obsession with time past isn‘t the result, as it is with so many other grey- , white- , or no-hairs, of coming to terms with a poetic career or of adding a notch to the canonical libraries of loss and expiration -- he’s been mining the same shaft since the 70s. If that seems a bit forbidding to a first-time reader of Coles, a lighter (or greedier) angle to follow is that there’s a lot more of that past to work with.
Where We Might Have Been (2010) uses the backward glance as negative or optional definer (“Places”), identity through others (“Too Tall Jones”), and present day self-identifier through fate, both wry and subtly scary (“A Lucian Freud Moment”; “The Young Women”).
Coles is certainly more relaxed here than in any of three previous volumes of his I’ve read. This is good and bad: the off-hand comments can stop the narrative flow without apology as if to note how the aside is part of memory’s diversionary charm and mischievousness, with the no-less-truthful contradiction that many connections have their own rationale (“when I was less untidy than I am now and was/wearing a watch, which I no longer seem to need, so/I soon had an answer for her”, from “Places”); but some of the colloquialisms are either amusing or irritating, depending on how the reader responds to these off-the-cuff, reflex phrases. I reacted with the latter energy to “You see?” (“Memory, Camus, Beaches”), “some of which I feel/entitled to, some of which not so much” (“Ruined House”), and “but the thing is/daylight was so close” (“I Have Gazed Upon the Face of Agamemnon”).
These quick shifts serve a larger fabric. Unlike David Donnell, whose spontaneous ramblings are phony and self-congratulatory, Coles’ apparent spontaneities are structured , and -- at their best -- create a powerfully hypnotic memory-weave of doubt and universal revelation. C. K. Williams’ profound philosophical coda to “Combat” comes to mind: “What I really know, of course, I’ll never know again./Beautiful memory, most precious and most treacherous sister.” There’s also more than a hint of W. G. Sebald here and elsewhere in Coles’ output -- memory as maze or vapour -- and it’s intriguing that Sebald’s English translator, Michael Hulse, is thanked (with others) in the back-page Author’s Note. Whereas Williams and Sebald wax lugubrious on the impossibility of accurate recollection, Coles at times revels in a fuller prism: “how wonderful it is//to be just now, in imagination, tasting it again!” (“Proust and My Grandfather (and Eaton’s, God Rot Them)”). The relevant word here is “imagination”, and Coles is more accepting of the differences between “truth” and personal colouring, without (Coleridge) succumbing to a conflation of “fancy” with gifted image. The endearing wrap-up to “Proust and My Grandfather”, though, dares to imprint its loving re-imaginings on the air, anyway:
“And I may think, also, about Proust’s friend
Emmanuel, whose cry
to the cabman has also lasted far longer than the few seconds
he or his listening friends thought it would last. And
I will think about my grandfather who handed me
the yellow pear to eat and then to forget about. As he
forgot about it and is forgotten.”
Resignation or challenge?
This tension between seemingly frivolous recounting (or assessing) and necessary commemoration is enacted in the remarkable “True Words”, where “There’s no shortage/of words all of which are trying to/shout themselves down into the earth after/a tumbling child.”. Words and flesh pass. But a further transubstantiation -- a third -- points to the deathless imaginative impulse.
Where We Might Have Been (2010) uses the backward glance as negative or optional definer (“Places”), identity through others (“Too Tall Jones”), and present day self-identifier through fate, both wry and subtly scary (“A Lucian Freud Moment”; “The Young Women”).
Coles is certainly more relaxed here than in any of three previous volumes of his I’ve read. This is good and bad: the off-hand comments can stop the narrative flow without apology as if to note how the aside is part of memory’s diversionary charm and mischievousness, with the no-less-truthful contradiction that many connections have their own rationale (“when I was less untidy than I am now and was/wearing a watch, which I no longer seem to need, so/I soon had an answer for her”, from “Places”); but some of the colloquialisms are either amusing or irritating, depending on how the reader responds to these off-the-cuff, reflex phrases. I reacted with the latter energy to “You see?” (“Memory, Camus, Beaches”), “some of which I feel/entitled to, some of which not so much” (“Ruined House”), and “but the thing is/daylight was so close” (“I Have Gazed Upon the Face of Agamemnon”).
These quick shifts serve a larger fabric. Unlike David Donnell, whose spontaneous ramblings are phony and self-congratulatory, Coles’ apparent spontaneities are structured , and -- at their best -- create a powerfully hypnotic memory-weave of doubt and universal revelation. C. K. Williams’ profound philosophical coda to “Combat” comes to mind: “What I really know, of course, I’ll never know again./Beautiful memory, most precious and most treacherous sister.” There’s also more than a hint of W. G. Sebald here and elsewhere in Coles’ output -- memory as maze or vapour -- and it’s intriguing that Sebald’s English translator, Michael Hulse, is thanked (with others) in the back-page Author’s Note. Whereas Williams and Sebald wax lugubrious on the impossibility of accurate recollection, Coles at times revels in a fuller prism: “how wonderful it is//to be just now, in imagination, tasting it again!” (“Proust and My Grandfather (and Eaton’s, God Rot Them)”). The relevant word here is “imagination”, and Coles is more accepting of the differences between “truth” and personal colouring, without (Coleridge) succumbing to a conflation of “fancy” with gifted image. The endearing wrap-up to “Proust and My Grandfather”, though, dares to imprint its loving re-imaginings on the air, anyway:
“And I may think, also, about Proust’s friend
Emmanuel, whose cry
to the cabman has also lasted far longer than the few seconds
he or his listening friends thought it would last. And
I will think about my grandfather who handed me
the yellow pear to eat and then to forget about. As he
forgot about it and is forgotten.”
Resignation or challenge?
This tension between seemingly frivolous recounting (or assessing) and necessary commemoration is enacted in the remarkable “True Words”, where “There’s no shortage/of words all of which are trying to/shout themselves down into the earth after/a tumbling child.”. Words and flesh pass. But a further transubstantiation -- a third -- points to the deathless imaginative impulse.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Anti Anti-Sonnet
I recently finished an interesting anti-sonnet rant by Chris Jennings in the latest issue of Arc. In a mode simultaneously defensive and offensive, he declaims that this will be unlike the paternal “because I said so” rationale, that he will, indeed, provide reasons for his antipathy to the popular, ancient poetic form.
I couldn’t find any.
Jennings complains that the elements that typically -- or at least often -- go into the making of a sonnet can be found in other forms. Metaphor, rhyme, metrical patterning, imagery, development: these and other technical usages are not unique to the sonnet. As far as this goes, it is, of course, correct. A sonnet, like a lover, may be similar to any other form/object of desire in that it has a nose, two hands, and a voice. But discrimination (in the reader/lover) and unique thrill (in the loved one/poem) is all. Jennings’ statement can find no corollary, and his superficial manoeuvering reminds me of a Boethius characterizing Cicero’s works by arranging the contents of minor treatises into a dry categorical model instead of wrestling with the latter’s complex and anguished studies of ethics, aesthetics, and rhetorical imprint. Jennings, here, compares the “strophe, antistrophe, and epode” of the ode with the proposition and “solution” of the sonnet. (“Solution” is a trying and simplistic word to use here. Even “resolution” falls short. And it’s no defense that it’s just relating the dictionary definition.) But an ode, however much some of its surface strategies may be seen to mirror those of a sonnet, is a different kettle of coho. Though odes have undergone perhaps even greater transformations and variations, in technical understanding, than have sonnets, the predominant mode of the former -- notwithstanding the medial antistrophe or Horace’s satirical efforts -- has been one of praise. The mode of the sonnet, however, has been by turns (no pun) cool, epideictic, stately, whispery, and much else besides.
This last contrast is ironic since Jennings stumbles through his own antistrophe beginning just to conclude that the only thing that distinguishes a sonnet from any other poetic form is its fourteen lines (while I acknowledge his noting of exceptions and variants). It’s a puzzlingly simplistic statement, and it asks one to consider what goes on in Jennings’ mind when first chancing upon a sonnet. Is the experience wrecked only retroactively when numbering the lines? And if history is any indication, the sonnet has developed (not in the sense of “progressed”) into a beast as unlike a family member one to another as any other form one’d care to name. I’d suggest reading Lowell’s “Rats” immediately after Petrarch’s “Qual Donna Attende a Gloriosa Fama”, but other pairs or score-series, while not as plentiful as Wershler-Henry’s sonnet-bot, are certainly just as appropriate as the one I‘ve mentioned, and far more illuminating than the meta-commentary mocking postmodernists or the can’t-see-the-trees-for-the-forest reactionaries.
On to the next breezy snit (of Jennings). Sonnets are thought to be overpraised in that their brevity allows anthologizers to stuff more examples into the covers of a teaching artifact so that pedagogical ease is introduced as a kind of quick-read-and-parse bureaucratic panacea. This is a qualitative post hoc fallacy. It’s not a sonnet’s (or all sonnets’) fault that expediency trumps value. If Jennings’ argument is that other forms (the epic?) are as worthy or worthier, surely it can be better employed in an arena other than competing interests in university syllabi. Undergrad students aren’t the defining arbiter of canon construction. And in any event, exposure to one good sonnet is just as likely to send them on a mission to excavate The Iliad than it is to have them juiced to mimic a Shakespearian final couplet. Yes, I realize his argument, such as it is, has to do with the supposed prevalence of sonnet publication. But I don’t see a plethora of sonneteering tomes on display. I do, however, note many other culturally- or politically-driven theme anthologies -- none of them sonnet-crafted -- available to both the academic and wider public for perusal.
Jennings gives no examples to corroborate his holus-bolus denunciation. Misguided generalities don’t make up for a determined avoidance of the sonnet’s exquisite meshing of rhetoric and dialectic. And neither does his twice-intoned (the first emphasis wasn’t strong enough on its own?) and ripped-off-from-Steven-Beattie (without the back-up argument) “fuck sonnets”.
The impetus to write this response didn’t come from a rush to defend the form. I don’t hate or love sonnets. I hate or love poems. There are diamonds and poop in any one form and in all of them. It’s patronizing -- and embarrassing -- to describe the urge to write sonnets as coming from a need to measure up to past masters. I would think the greatest impetus is one of creative enjoyment. And by the way, though Bishop said that the writing of sestinas was a "stunt" (I don't get the damning parallel here, and I don't know the context or tone of her statement), she wrote a poem called "Sestina". And Pound didn’t bury all his sonnets, Mr Jennings. Even he took his own words -- "make it new" -- to heart.
I couldn’t find any.
Jennings complains that the elements that typically -- or at least often -- go into the making of a sonnet can be found in other forms. Metaphor, rhyme, metrical patterning, imagery, development: these and other technical usages are not unique to the sonnet. As far as this goes, it is, of course, correct. A sonnet, like a lover, may be similar to any other form/object of desire in that it has a nose, two hands, and a voice. But discrimination (in the reader/lover) and unique thrill (in the loved one/poem) is all. Jennings’ statement can find no corollary, and his superficial manoeuvering reminds me of a Boethius characterizing Cicero’s works by arranging the contents of minor treatises into a dry categorical model instead of wrestling with the latter’s complex and anguished studies of ethics, aesthetics, and rhetorical imprint. Jennings, here, compares the “strophe, antistrophe, and epode” of the ode with the proposition and “solution” of the sonnet. (“Solution” is a trying and simplistic word to use here. Even “resolution” falls short. And it’s no defense that it’s just relating the dictionary definition.) But an ode, however much some of its surface strategies may be seen to mirror those of a sonnet, is a different kettle of coho. Though odes have undergone perhaps even greater transformations and variations, in technical understanding, than have sonnets, the predominant mode of the former -- notwithstanding the medial antistrophe or Horace’s satirical efforts -- has been one of praise. The mode of the sonnet, however, has been by turns (no pun) cool, epideictic, stately, whispery, and much else besides.
This last contrast is ironic since Jennings stumbles through his own antistrophe beginning just to conclude that the only thing that distinguishes a sonnet from any other poetic form is its fourteen lines (while I acknowledge his noting of exceptions and variants). It’s a puzzlingly simplistic statement, and it asks one to consider what goes on in Jennings’ mind when first chancing upon a sonnet. Is the experience wrecked only retroactively when numbering the lines? And if history is any indication, the sonnet has developed (not in the sense of “progressed”) into a beast as unlike a family member one to another as any other form one’d care to name. I’d suggest reading Lowell’s “Rats” immediately after Petrarch’s “Qual Donna Attende a Gloriosa Fama”, but other pairs or score-series, while not as plentiful as Wershler-Henry’s sonnet-bot, are certainly just as appropriate as the one I‘ve mentioned, and far more illuminating than the meta-commentary mocking postmodernists or the can’t-see-the-trees-for-the-forest reactionaries.
On to the next breezy snit (of Jennings). Sonnets are thought to be overpraised in that their brevity allows anthologizers to stuff more examples into the covers of a teaching artifact so that pedagogical ease is introduced as a kind of quick-read-and-parse bureaucratic panacea. This is a qualitative post hoc fallacy. It’s not a sonnet’s (or all sonnets’) fault that expediency trumps value. If Jennings’ argument is that other forms (the epic?) are as worthy or worthier, surely it can be better employed in an arena other than competing interests in university syllabi. Undergrad students aren’t the defining arbiter of canon construction. And in any event, exposure to one good sonnet is just as likely to send them on a mission to excavate The Iliad than it is to have them juiced to mimic a Shakespearian final couplet. Yes, I realize his argument, such as it is, has to do with the supposed prevalence of sonnet publication. But I don’t see a plethora of sonneteering tomes on display. I do, however, note many other culturally- or politically-driven theme anthologies -- none of them sonnet-crafted -- available to both the academic and wider public for perusal.
Jennings gives no examples to corroborate his holus-bolus denunciation. Misguided generalities don’t make up for a determined avoidance of the sonnet’s exquisite meshing of rhetoric and dialectic. And neither does his twice-intoned (the first emphasis wasn’t strong enough on its own?) and ripped-off-from-Steven-Beattie (without the back-up argument) “fuck sonnets”.
The impetus to write this response didn’t come from a rush to defend the form. I don’t hate or love sonnets. I hate or love poems. There are diamonds and poop in any one form and in all of them. It’s patronizing -- and embarrassing -- to describe the urge to write sonnets as coming from a need to measure up to past masters. I would think the greatest impetus is one of creative enjoyment. And by the way, though Bishop said that the writing of sestinas was a "stunt" (I don't get the damning parallel here, and I don't know the context or tone of her statement), she wrote a poem called "Sestina". And Pound didn’t bury all his sonnets, Mr Jennings. Even he took his own words -- "make it new" -- to heart.
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